Trump paves the way for the next American strongman
A few years ago, a student of strongmen — think Mussolini, not muscles — took a look at Donald Trump and saw something familiar. Lots of things, actually: a cult of personality, an exaggerated sense of virility, a bellicose tone, a desperate need to discredit the media or any entity that might conflict with his view of events.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat had spent a career studying fascism, primarily, “Il Duce,” Italian dictator Benito Mussolini. She had long recognized Trump’s strongman inclinations. She watched his march to the presidency. The 2017 op-ed Ben-Ghiat wrote for CNN on the eve of Trump’s inauguration, an event forever defined by the administration’s use of “alternative facts” to exaggerate public attendance, was headlined “Trump is Following the Authoritarian Playbook.”
Many laughed off such comparisons, thinking the reality TV star too bumbling, his approach too undisciplined, his ideological principles too nonexistent to present a serious threat to the world’s oldest democracy. The laughs quieted over the past four years and have all but ceased in recent weeks as Trump has refused to concede his obvious loss of both the Electoral College and the popular vote, clinging to the presidency as though it were his birthright.
As we see in Ben-Ghiat’s new book, “Strongmen,” refusing to budge from power is also part of the authoritarian playbook. Trump admires Vladimir Putin, known to freely poison rivals and bend the constitution to his will, allowing him to stay in office until 2036 if he wants. Trump has only joked on Twitter about life without term limits, but his recent behaviors suggest he’d embrace such a life in a heartbeat.
About one thing Ben-Ghiat is adamant: It’s fruitless to compare Trump to any other president, at least from this country. “We can’t use democratic metrics to measure what Trump is doing,” she says by phone. “Those have never been his goals. He’s not
interested in good government or public welfare. He’s interested in making money for Trump organizations.”
Books such as “Strongmen,” Madeleine Albright’s “Fascism: A Warning” and Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt’s “How Democracies Die” have all looked to place the rise of Trumpism in historical context, to remind us that he didn’t materialize in a cloud out of nowhere and to warn that things can get a lot worse. But “Strongmen” is unique for focusing on the character traits that bond authoritarian leaders, from sexual gluttony to a violent emphasis on past national glories real or imagined. (Ben-Ghiat steers away from labeling Trump a fascist — the
U.S. isn’t a one-party system, and it still has open elections, as fraught as they’ve become — though his behavior practically does it for her).
The company Trump keeps in these pages is telling. There’s Hitler and Mussolini, famous fascists who liked to put on a show for their frothing faithful. “From the Nazi assemblies at Nuremberg, with Hitler’s name spelled out in Klieg lights, the strongman has turned politics into an aesthetic experience, with him as the star,” Ben-Ghiat writes. And: “Rallies were the fascist strongman’s favorite form of political theater and ego gratification. Both Mussolini and Hitler used them as sites of emotional training,” perfect for creating what Hitler called a “violent, lordly, fearless, cruel youth.”
We can see the virility model in Trump’s ideal, Putin, who likes
to be photographed shirtless doing macho activities, much as Mussolini did; and in Putin’s pal Silvio Berlusconi, former prime minister of Italy, famous for his sex parties attended by underage girls. Like Trump, Berlusconi rose to power through a real estate and media business and was dogged by corruption charges throughout his time in office.
Like Berlusconi, Trump is no stranger to accusations of sexual misconduct. The image of virility is a must for the strongman. “It’s this kind of cult of male force and domination, the omnipotent male who sees all and knows all and can guide the nation,” BenGhiat says. “They see themselves as men above all other men who can decide for us or speak for us.” It’s not for nothing that Trump began taking the stage at rallies to the tune of the Village People’s “Macho Man.”
The distinctions among these men are worth studying, too. When Berlusconi was drummed out of office, he conceded and won office in a subsequent election — a strongman in persona, but one who ultimately respected democracy.
The strongman murderers row, on the other hand, goes on and on. It includes Libya’s Muammar al-Gaddafi, whom Trump once courted for business dealings; Somalia’s Siad Barre, with whom former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort worked as a lobbyist; and Hungary’s Viktor Orban, over whom Trump has publicly fawned. (“You’ve done a good job and you’ve kept your country safe”). All rule or ruled with an iron hand. Their atrocity levels vary, but they all share a willingness to do anything to stay in power.
Which brings us back to the question of what kind of strongman is Trump, and what does he aspire to be? He’s the kind who cares above all about sticking around, regardless of whether he has been properly elected (or re-elected). His hostility toward democracy couldn’t be clearer, whether he’s sowing lies to discredit a legitimate vote or insisting that the press is not to be trusted (FAKE NEWS! in his allcaps Twitter parlance). This strongman disposes of those who tell the truth, as he did this week when he Tweeted the dismissal of Chris Krebs, the Department of Homeland Security official and cybersecurity expert who made the mistake of observing the election wasn’t compromised.
As Ben-Ghiat writes of the strongman in general, “Once his supporters bond to his person, they stop caring about his falsehoods. They believe him because they believe in him.”
So what made America, land of small-d democracy, so ripe for the strongman’s picking in 2016? How did we get played by Trumpism? As Ben-Ghiat has pointed out, the strongman comes to power via backlash against some manner of social progress. Recall that Trump gained his political foothold by insisting (falsely, of course) that Barack Obama wasn’t born in the U.S. He found himself an audience in those who couldn’t stomach the idea of a Black president with an immigrant father and Arabic name.. Those same followers cheered when Trump, announcing his candidacy in 2015, painted broadly the Mexicans crossing the border as rapists and criminals.
Here Ben-Ghiat uses a top Trump aide to draw a comparison to strongmen past. “Stephen Miller,” she writes, “has been connected to far-right networks for years. … His depiction of Trump as a defender of ‘the principles of Western civilization’
is all too familiar.” The strongman and his disciples have a thing for ethnic purity.
This all sounds rather bleak. Not so fast, says Ben-Ghiat. America just had a free and open election, and the strongman, despite his hysterical protestations to the contrary, lost. He’ll continue to test the fiber of the country’s democracy by bullying and lying his way through a series of recounts and legal challenges, in true strongman fashion. He will probably never concede defeat. But he lost. “The more you know about this history,” Ben-Ghiat says, “the more it seems miraculous that the election turned out as a historic opportunity that few countries have had to turn this back. So in that sense there’s a lot of hope.”
But there’s also reason to fear the future. As Zeynep Tufekci points out in The Atlantic, Trump has lain the groundwork for a more learned, disciplined and talented strongman to take the reins. With the Electoral College always a threat to trump the public’s will and gerrymandering running amok, the next strongman won’t even have to lie and cheat if he plays his cards right. “The situation is a perfect setup, in other words, for a talented politician to run on Trumpism in 2024,” writes Tufekci. “A person without the eager Twitter fingers and greedy hotel chains, someone with a penchant for governing rather than golf.”
In other words, a competent strongman. One who knows how to use a political system’s flaws without looking like a fool. One who might be taking notes and biding his time.